change? Has the character done anything more than sit around (or walk around) and think?” If the answer to all these questions is no (and thus the only purpose of the present scene is to allow the character to remember the past incident in the flashback proper), consider omitting the frame and telling the flashback scene (after deciding on its true beginning and a satisfying conclusion) in the order that it occurred (often it’s the first scene—or one of the first—in the story) in terms of the rest of the narrative’s incidents.
The fictive excuse for the flashback is that it is a product of memory. The reason for fiction, however, is that it provides the explanatory force of history. This may seem like an overly grand statement. But give it a little thought.
We live our lives in chronological order.
When we remember them, however, our mental movement is almost entirely associational.
Listen to people who are not trying to solve a particular problem reminisce with one another. One good meal leads to another. One sadness leads to another sadness, till suddenly it becomes too much and the conversation leaps to pleasure or silliness or gossip. It’s only when human beings want to solve a problem or figure out the causality behind something that they carefully try to reconstruct chronological order.
If you’ve ever done it with someone else, you know how hard it can be.
Why did we lose the war? Because before we marched off to fight we didn’t start out with good weapons and well-trained men. Why was last year’s crop so good when the crop before that was so poor? Because the river flooded and left a deposit of silt over the land that promoted rich growth—while just before the year of the poor crop no flooding occurred at all. Chronological causality is how history begins, and that can only be supplied by chronological order. Only the concomitant cross-checking and stabilizing by notation and the pressure to be accurate and exact that two or more people remember in dialogue with one another creates history. What one person remembers by himself, while it may be a contributing element to history, is precisely not-history until it enters into such a dialogue. Chronology is our first historical mode.
Fiction is an intellectually imaginative act committed on the materials of memory that tries for the form of history.
That’s why a political climate pushing the individual to see her- or himself as autonomous and self-sufficient is, by definition, a climate unsupportive of rich and satisfying fiction. (This is not the same as an individual writer in her or his work pushing against a climate of conformity and security to assert her or his individuality.) A climate that discourages research and open discussion is usually pretty distrustful of good fiction as well.
However much, as readers, we lose ourselves in a novel or a story, fiction itself is an experience on the order of memory—not on the order of actual occurrence. (History is an even higher level of abstraction.) It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix,* join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.
That false memory is what a story is.
Among other things, the writer’s art comprises various techniques to make that unreal memory as clear and vivid as possible. That clarity, that vividness, is entirely dependent on the order and selection of her or his words. Again, one might say that the fiction writer is trying to create a false memory with the force of history. The problem with the flashback is, again, that we don’t have too many memories of memories that we recognize as such—or, when we have them, rarely are they the most vivid among our memories. Thus, the flashback is a tricky technique. Think about its problems if you’re going to use it. When you find yourself telling your story out of chronological order, ask yourself if it adds anything truly necessary or important to the telling, or is it just laziness or bad habit, a failure to think through the tale logically to (and from) a beginning.
Here, now, are the places I differ from Forster. First, I, too, am the reader who says, “Yes—oh dear, yes—the novel tells a story.” I too very much fear the second reader. (“I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.”) But while I fear him, unlike Forster, I don’t detest him. For while I believe (one) that the second reader is profoundly mistaken and needs to be the focus of most of today’s educational energy and (two) that he is the audience that most corrupts both critical and commercial approaches to the popular arts, I also feel that such audience members are educable, in a way that Forster probably didn’t. Today, this reader’s haunts are not golf courses but rather the active fandoms of TV, comic books, science fiction, and other venues particularly appreciative of paraliterature or popular culture. The fact is (which puts me close to Forster once more), I recognize that without some story—temporal, developmental, logical—most writing is simply not recognizable as fiction. But having said that (and this moves me away from Forster, even as it sets me in antagonistic opposition to Forster’s golfer), I see no particular reason why all writing, even if it begins by appropriating the name “novel,” “story,” or, indeed, “poem” or the name of any other genre, needs to be immediately recognizable as belonging to the genre label it carries. I have gotten great pleasure from “short stories” that were nothing but sequences of numbers, random words, or abstract pictures, not to mention comic books—a medium I love. I’ve gotten pleasure from J. G. Ballard’s “condensed novels,” which are collections of impressionistic fragments running only seven or eight pages each (see The Atrocity Exhibition, 1967). I have gotten pleasure from poems where the words were chosen by any number of games or operationalized systems or semantic or aesthetic tasks or within any of a variety of constraints. But all this will be discussed in its place. Genres are ways of reading, ways of understanding, complex moods, modes, and chains of expectations—discourses, if you will—and as such there is as much aesthetic pleasure (and use!) to be found in opposing those expectations as in acquiescing to them.
Sixty years ago, that witty and sensible critic Leonard Knights (“How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth,” 1948) noted: “Only as precipitates from memory are plot and character tangible; yet only in solution has either any emotive valency.” This is what Forster’s dull, ugly worm is all about. Plot, character, and the structure that constrains and embodies them are the solutes that effloresce into emotive force within the solution of those “finer growths.” Those “finer growths” through which the plot and characters achieve their emotive fullness are, themselves, controlled by structure. Most of the interminable discussions of plot in writing texts are useless because finally plot has no existence by itself; it is only a single aspect of a more complex process (which I call structure); and if the writer tries to deal with only the plot by itself, he or she ends up twisting at that dried-up little worm, which, when it effloresces, may or may not swell to proper shape and effect, depending entirely on the solute—the finer growths—it arrives in.
This book teases apart how writing works: what the process of its making consists of; and how its making is made by and remakes the world.
These are huge topics.
As the reader can see, this is not a large book.
My comments about them are suggestive rather than definitive. Still, with what notions we can harvest here—the ones we can speak of intelligibly—I hope my readers can begin to figure out how to do what they want on their own.
VIII
What sorts of stories do I enjoy?
What do I read for?
I
